Humour, sadness, elation, depression; pathos, ebullience, turbulence; love, hate, attraction, revulsion; pointing, pushing, pulling, cavorting; turning, tossing, tumbling, twisting; rock and roll, victory and defeat; all the elements, in fact, of intense human interaction and drama that were once the province of
figurative art, particularly
figurative painting — where they
formed the pretext upon which was built a profound diversity of imaginative visual constructs — are seemingly no longer at the behest of
figurative art, which languishes in states of mock - academia or faux - avant - gardism, by turns bathetic, mundane or
grotesque... all that human content is now, surprisingly but necessarily, the prerogative of the abstract artist.